If you do any article submissions for link building (which I strongly encourage you to) then you need to check out Article Submission Helper. Not only is it free, but its been a huge time saver for me getting unique articles out there with minimal effort.

With ASHelper you can quickly setup accounts with a few hundred article sites. Then anytime you have a new article ready to be published you enter the article text and submissions are rapidly done. Pretty sweet.

The software also allows you to “spin” articles which means placing a number of options for text in spots of the article and then the system will randomly pick one of the options for each submission. For example, if you had”{a lot|hundreds|thousands|tons} of {people|users}” in your article then one time it would submit as “hundred of users”, the next might be “tons of people” and then next perhaps “a lot of users”. This is huge for taking a single article and making it into many different ones.

Again Article Submission Helper is completely free so there’s no real risk in giving it a try. Let me know what you think.

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Really exceptional post over on ProBlogger details what you should do if your website rankings drop significantly and it of course also applies to your blog (since your blog is, after all, a website too).

I’ve had a few blogs in the past that have been hurt big time by sudden drops in my Google rankings and I think this posts helps understand the best way to approach that situation if it ever happens to you.

Read the article on ProBlogger…

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If you’re looking to ramp up your link building efforts I strongly suggest article submissions. The links you get from submitting the articles can really help you rank for less competitive keywords.

So here’s what you wanna do:

1. Write a good article on a specific topic. Pick 1 medium to long tail keyword and focus on that as you write.
2. Proofread and make sure the article is pretty solid.
3. Submit to EzineArticles and wait for it to be approved. EzineArticles is the best article site out there and only accepts unique articles so you have to publish there first.
4. Now use Article Submission Helper (free at http://www.articlesubmissionhelper.com) to ’spin” new versions of the article. By “spin”, what you do in Article Submission Helper is rewrite a few sections in the article to give various options for those sections. Then Article Submission Helper will randomly pick from the various sections and come up with a unique article.
5. Also in Article Submission Helper you can submit to a ton of different article sites and even rotate (“spin”) your bio to get different types of anchor text.

To give it a try head over to http://www.articlesubmissionhelper.com. Again, its total free and definitely worth a try.

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How to Treat your Blog like a Business – Title explains this one pretty well already…
30 Blog Improvement Tips to Increase Your Traffic – Some are pretty basic, but others are worth the read for.
Pro Blogger Daniel Scocco Shares his Internet Marketing Tips – A bunch of interesting and useful ideas.
Review of CrazyEgg – Ok, yea this is a post from this blog, but I think you should read it and give CrazyEgg a try. Definitely worth it.
How to Use Google’s Wonder Wheel to Find Topics to Write about – Was really excited to see this.
73 Ways to Become a Better Writer – Like all list posts, some are quite basic but the list as a whole is valuable in my opinion.

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After watching Tim Ferriss’ video on blogging I couldn’t help but give CrazyEgg a try and its pretty damn awesome.

I set up a mini test on FreshTrend.com which is another site that I run and the CrazyEgg software automatically tracks what visitors are doing on the page: where they click, what pages they go to next, where they came from, etc. It sounds on the surface like its not much different than Google Analytics, which is why I was skeptical. But Crazy Egg blows GA out of the water in terms of getting actionable results.

For example, this morning I setup a test of the site homepage to monitor the next 3,000 visitor and after just 300 so far I can already tell that I need to improve the bottom part of my pages since many people are actually reading through the whole post and then clicking the “Next” link (which is tiny). By making that bigger I bet I’ll drastically improve people clicking on that and thus keep them on the site longer. The beauty of CrazyEgg is that after I make that change I’ll be able to test it and see how well it works out.

Final analysis: Anyone serious about their blog should give CrazyEgg a try, even if you try for just 1 month you’ll learn a ton about your blog’s visitors.

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Best Bets

1. Flickr – Under Creative Commons you can use a lot of the images on Flickr, just make sure you give the appropriate credit.

2. Stock.Xchng – Big collection of free stock photos, some have weird license terms, but the collection and variety is pretty amazing.

3. MorgueFile – The amount of photos is a bit limited but the quality is really quite high.

4. Stock Vault – More of an exchange for images between photographers but you can snag some free images from here even if you’re not a photographer.

5. EveryStockPhoto – Search engine of free stock photos. Very useful for deep dives looking for images.

Hit or Miss

6. FreeRange – Nice collection of good quality images.

7. FreeFoto – Collection is a bit limited, but occasionally you’ll find exactly what you need.

8. Pixel Galerie – Site isn’t in English but isn’t that hard to navigate and does have some nice pictures.

9. Unprofound – Decent collection in both size and quality, but nothing too amazing.

10. Public-Domain-Photos.com – A few thousand images only but you might stumble on what you need.

Longshots

11. Google Images – You can always search images on Google and then contact the site owner of any images that come up to see if you can have permission to use the image. Not very likely to work, but you never know. Your odds will be better if you’re non-commercial.

When All Else Fails…

12. If none of those worked out then I suggest iStockPhoto. Pictures are super cheap and really nice quality, but not quite free

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